Information having to do with the history of Northwest Indiana and the research and doings in the service of Clio, the muse of history, of IU Northwest emeritus professor of History James B. Lane

Friday, July 14, 2017

Dispatches

“Only the wild ones,

give you something and
never want it back.”

“Only the Wild Ones,” Dispatch

Leading
off Dispatch’s new album, “America, Location 12,” “Only the Wild Ones”
references Beat poet Gregory Corso and the anti-establishment Sixties Michigan band
MC5. The final chorus lines go:

Only the wild
ones, are the ones you can never catch
Stars are up now no place to go... but everywhere

After
playing “Only the Wild Ones” on WXRT, Marty Lennartz mentioned that Dispatch
recorded “America, Location 12” at Panoramic Studio in Stinson Beach,
California, where The Head and the Heart recorded “Signs of Light.” Formed in 1996, the indie rock band Dispatch,
originally from the Boston area, took a decade-long hiatus before re-forming
six years ago and finally now coming into its own.

The word dispatch can mean killing someone, like
when Myrtle Bennett shot her husband Jack over a bridge dispute, but it most
commonly refers to sending off a report, such as dispatching a news story or
communiqué. Prolific novelist Stephen
King wrote: “When I was a kid I believed
everything I was told, everything I read, and every dispatch sent out by my own
overheated imagination. This made for more than a few sleepless nights, but it
also filled the world I lived in with colors and textures I would not have
traded for a lifetime of restful nights.”

On “Final Jeopardy” contestants
had to deal with this question: “A landmark 1957 New York Times story
called him ‘a powerful six-footer, olive-skinned…with a straggly beard.’”Everyone
got it right: The answer, in the form of a question: “Who is Fidel Castro?”On February 24, 1957 (my fifteenth birthday),
New York Times correspondent Herbert
L. Matthews filed a dispatch that included an interview with the Cuban
revolutionary from his hide-out in the Sierra Maestra mountains.Matthews wrote:

The personality of the man
is overpowering.It was easy to see that
his men adored him and also to see why he has caught the imagination of the
youth of Cuba all over the island.Here
was an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage and of
remarkable qualities of leadership.

Castro is a great
talker.His brown eyes flash; his
intense face is pushed close to the listener and the whispering voice, as in a
stage play, lends a vivid sense of drama.

1957
was the year that the Russians launched Sputnik into
space, causing critics to question whether America had fallen behind the Soviet
Union in its dedication to math, science, and space exploration.The accomplishment led to Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev becoming Time’s
Person of the Year.

Elizabeth Eckford being jeered on way to Central High School

On September 23, 1957, President
Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered National Guard troops to be deployed to Little
Rock, Arkansas, with orders to protect 9 black students integrating Central
High School in compliance with the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. The
Montgomery Bus Boycott had come to a successful resolution just months before,
signaling that Sothern Blacks were no longer willing to tolerate segregation.
The photo of brave Elizabeth Eckford being jeered on her way to Central High School moved
millions around the world.Many American
leaders realized this was no way to win the Cold War propaganda battle with the
Soviet Union.Harry Ashmore of the Arkansas Gazette was one of the few
Southern newspaper editors who supported federal intervention: a boycott cost
the paper millions of dollars.

Michael
Herr’s “Dispatches” (1977) brilliantly captures the tragedy of the American
military presence in Vietnam in 1967. The
two best Vietnam war movies, “Apocalypse Now” and “Full metal Jacket,” employ
plentiful quotes from “Dispatches” that mock the folly of unleashing a deranged
killing machine on a country and its people that, in Herr’s words, “could do
everything but stop.” Or win hearts
and minds – just the reverse. I can
still visualize the Peace signs and mottos mentioned by Herr that marines
painted on their helmets: Hell Sucks, Far From Fearless, Born To Raise Hel, and
Avenger are but a few. “Dispatches” begins: “There was a map of Vietnamon the wall of my apartment in Saigon
and some nights, coming back late to the city, I’d lie out on my bed and look
at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off. That map was a
marvel, especially now that it wasn’t real anymore.” Herr compared being in Saigon to “sitting
inside the folded petals of a poisonous flower.” The “Paris of the East” had become a cesspool
of corruption.

Just lying
there tracking the rotations of the ceiling fan, reaching for the fat roach
that sat on my Zippo in a yellow disc of grass tar. There were mornings when
I’d do it before my feet even hit the floor. Dear Mom, stoned again. In the
Highlands, where the Montagnards would trade you a pound of legendary grass for
a carton of Salems, I got stoned with some infantry from the 4th.

Distinguished
NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel, 44, speaks Arabic fluently and has
covered wars in Iraq and Syria as well as the “Arab Spring” in Libya and Egypt. The show “On Assignment with Richard Engel”
recently characterized Russia as a Mafia state fueled by graft and corruption,
where enemies of Vladimir Putin are silenced, sometimes with extreme prejudice. Engel was recently in Mosul covering the
Iraqi victory over ISIS. Like with Vietnamese cities such as Hue, it became
necessary to destroy the city in order to seize it from the caliphate.

Puvungna Pow Wow at Cal State Long Beach

John Attinasi

I
took Ronald Loewe’s “Of Sacred Lands and Strip Malls: The Battle for Puvungna” (2006)
to former IUN colleague John Attinasi, a professor of Linguistics and Education at Cal State Long Beach and
is back in Miller.According to a
publisher’s statement:

A 22 acre strip of
land—known as Puvungna—lies at the edge of California State University’s Long
Beach campus. The land, indisputably
owned by California, is alsosacred
to several Native American tribes. And these 22 acres have been the nexus for
an acrimonious and costly conflict over control of the land.Of Sacred Lands and Strip Mallstells the story of Puvungna, from
the region’s deep history, through years of struggle between activists and
campus administration, and ongoing reverberations from the conflict.As Loewe makes clear, this is a case
study with implications beyond a single controversy; at stake in the legal
battle is the constitutionality of state codes meant to protect sacred sites
from commercial development, and the right of individuals to participate in
public hearings. It is a compelling snapshot of issues surrounding contemporary
Native American landscapes.

The
main fight to save Puvungna took place during the early 1990s; Indian activists
adopted the slogan, “PUVUNGNA: SAVE IT DON’T PAVE IT.” Plans for a strip mall were eventually
scrapped. Attinasi greeted me wearing a Puvungna
t-shirt and told me that Native Americans from all over the country attended
the forty-seventh annual Pow Wow in March. He and Lillian had been back from
Long Beach only a month but had a terrific garden in back, featuring corn,
tomatoes, and other vegetables.

Bill Buckley in 2008

Poet
Bill Buckley brought me a batch of poems for the Archives, including “White
Pines”:

I
have always lived

in a
house

if a
white pine

grew
nearby.

Today
I have one in my front yard,

the
only one

on
our shady street.

Witness
to my life,

I ask
you:

“Do
you absorb memories

in
the embrace of your branches,

in
these winds off Lake Michigan?”

In
Upper Michigan,

there
is the last

virgin
white pine forest in North America.

I
took my nine-year-old son there,

and
watched his eyes widen

under
the cathedral of those trees,

as if
they were speaking to him.

Tonight,
I wait,

for
the pine tree in my yard

to
speak to me,

in
its witness to the births, marriages,

and
deaths on my block,

where
funerals parade up to a cemetery,

two
blocks up,

and
from where this silent pine

has
lived

for
100 years.

When
I saw HBO advertising “The Birth of a
Nation,” I feared that it was the racist 1915 D.W. Griffith film, but it
actually was about Nat Turner and the 1831 slave insurrection in Southampton
County, Virginia. Watching slaves being
raped and brutalized reminded me of a July 4th address Frederick Douglass made
in Rochester, New York, in 1852, which David Remnick used in a New Yorker article castigating Trump for
eroding the dignity of the Presidency. Douglass told members of the Rochester
Anti-Slavery Sewing Society:

What, to the American slave,
is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other
days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant
victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy
license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are
empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your
shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your
sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to
him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to
cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation
on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people
of the United States, at this very hour.

It’s
been months since I’ve gone to the movies, but with, Toni out of town, I saw
“Baby Driver,” starring Ansel Elgort as a getaway driver forced to go on one
final job for a crime boss (Kevin Spacey).
Elgort came into prominence for playing a cancer patient with a
prosthetic leg in “The Fault in Our Stars” (2014). I’m no fan of car chase scenes, but Rolling Stone gave “Baby Driver” three
and a half stars. Its campiness reminded me of Fargo without the kooky accents. It was a hoot seeing Jon Hamm,
Jamie Foxx, Lanny Joon, and Flea playing thugs Buddy, Bats, JD, and Eddie. One laugh-out-loud moment is when Buddy
listens on one of Baby’s ear plugs to Queens’s “Brighton Rock.” Another is when JD, told to buy Michael Myers
masks from the movie “Halloween” for a heist, comes back with Mike Myers masks
from “Austin Powers”: